We live in a world in which we receive a lot of data, and behind it there’s an even greater avalanche promised. How do we make sense of it all? And who has the time?

App designers and developers who have found ways to gather this new data need to take a step further and teach us – the users – how to gain important insights without devoting our lives to sorting through mountains of information.

In the third and last piece of the manifesto for The Notified Self, I focus on a few of these skills. They are fast becoming a professional requirement for lives in the modern world where new sensors are giving us unprecedented access to data about ourselves and the world around us.

Now, we need to develop these hitherto unforeseen skills to merely keep up, a critical aspect of the equation that software and wearable companies seem to have overlooked.

Visit my article on Medium – How to Use Data-Driven Insights to Accomplish the Informed Self.

I just released a new post on Medium about notifications, interruptions and notifications that will occupy the attention of 2Time Labs for the next several months.

It’s a new concept called “The Notified Self” – the vision of a professional who is perfectly notified by the digital ecosystem formed by his/her devices, apps, platforms and programs. It’s the logical next step after the Quantified Self (QS).

In other words, now that all this new data is available from QS, how does it need to be managed in order to benefit the user? Or in other words, how do we focus our attention on the data so we don’t become overwhelmed?

Click here to see my long form post on how this problem needs to be tackled with respect to Interruptions. It’s the first part of a three part series. The second part on The Warned Self is here.

If this a topic you already have an interest in, it might be an opportunity to apply to the next InnerLab.

How is it that the above graphic encapsulates the past few months I spent writing Perfect Time-Based Productivity – A Professional Approach? (The book is 90% complete and will be released in September on Kindle.) This graphic is a perfect example of some of what I had to do to bring it to this point. It shows:

How I filled some huge gaps in knowledge that counter the prevailing wisdom. For example, college students arrive on campus with skills they are already using to manage their time, yet the majority of orientation programs designed to help them skip over this fact, leaving them with little or none of the specific assistance they really need. Researchers aren’t clear on this point so I had to push the issue in my book – arguing that if ALL the research showing that incoming freshman have some skills, and NONE of the research showed they lack all skills, that many researchers were simply incorrect in their starting assumptions. Of course, students know that they wouldn’t be in college if they didn’t have some productivity skills. Duh.

Why people are so confused, and give confusing advice in the area of time-based productivity. Search YouTube for videos on “Why time management doesn’t exist.” This year alone, they have been rolling out one after another emphasizing a fact that many already understand, including many incoming freshmen. People who try to manage (or control) time fail from the start – just try to video someone “managing their time,” show it to another person and ask them what’s going on in the film. Instead, we need to shift our attention to managing a psychological object I have labelled a “time demand.” Once you get the hang of seeing them, the confusion lifts.

The value of scientific research. I have researched a number of universities and their time management websites designed to help students. They are a bit embarrassing on a whole. They simply haven’t kept up with the most recent books on the topic which don’t happen to come from academia. Within academia there have been some fantastic insights published, but they happen to reside in numerous fields. Psychology. Industrial engineering. Management. Adult Learning. Philosophy. Multidisciplinary research is very hard to conduct within university environments. A college adviser who needs to pull together some time management content for incoming students simply doesn’t have time to read 100 papers. Instead, they’ll just visit another college’s page and do some linking. (The Stanford page on time management for students is quite popular.)

These are just a few of the concepts I have wrestled into my book. To sign up for early notification including free launch bonuses, visit my book’s website and join the list for further information.

A few years ago, I remember talking with a friend who was telecommuting and saving an hour each way in traffic. At first, it sounded great! That is, until I heard about the electronic snooping, keystroke recording, logging and clicking in, and webcams that were used to track whether or not she was really working or goofing off.

Not only are they allowing their employees the freedom to do this, but in a recent study of the results at Best Buy, those who chose to set their own hours were found to be taking better care of their health, experiencing less work-family conflict and reduced turnover (from 11% to 6%.)

While this is good news, it would be interesting to know what the impact might be on the productivity of the salespeople who are the targets of the ROWE program. (ROWE stands for “Results Only Work Environment.”) That would truly get the attention of forward-looking companies.

What caught my attention, however, was the fact that there was a control group that did not sign up for the ROWE program. It made me think that there might be some who are just not interested in that much freedom, and just want to collect a paycheck for doing a certain amount of work.

It also made me think that the company would do well to give their employees in the ROWE program an opportunity to upgrade their time management skills. Simply giving employees the ability to manage their own time does not necessarily mean that they are more effective.

In fact, giving them more freedom would make things more difficult for anyone who must now make a number of new decisions about how they schedule their time, for the very first time. Without higher skills, they could easily find that their productivity drops.

This isn’t as unusual as it sounds. Whenever we undergo major life changes, it’s often the case that a review and upgrade of our personal productivity is required, just to be as productive as we were before the change occurred.

For example, I moved my place of residence over the weekend to an older residence with a gorgeous view of the Jamaican interior. As beautiful as the view is, moving has always caused a dip in my productivity as habits that were prompted by the physical environment need to be re-crafted from scratch.

The effect of these major life changes, whether they be a relocation or a ROWE program, is tremendous, and they deserve to be respected as such. It’s a good time to revisit our time management systems to see whether or not they can, in fact, hold up.

I can’t imagine what this post has to do with time management… but yesterday was Thanksgiving Day in the US, and this video made me not only thankful for my mother, but also the life I have here in Jamaica.

Last week’s teleclass focused on the most recent research in time management, and how it can be used to improve the way we schedule our time, and change our habits. I used the research by Dezhi Wu and the authors of Change Anything as my primary sources of information, taking their best ideas that we’re working with here at 2Time Labs.

Also, I want to give you access to a new way of teaching and learning time management via e-learning – using an interactive simulation that we developed. It’s a game of sorts, involving different choices you can make to help Brenda, a young professional, use the best time management techniques to navigate her first day back at work after a long vacation.

Meta

Disclaimer

Framework Consulting Inc. is headquartered in Hollywood, Florida, USA and is responsible for all the ideas, materials and content on the 2Time and MyTimeDesign websites. See the Contact Us tab to communicate with the company. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People® is a registered tradework of FranklinCovey. GTD and Getting Things Done are registered trademarks of the David Allen Company (davidco.com.) 2Time is not affiliated with or endorsed by the David Allen Company, Mission Control Productivity or FranklinCovey.